Join members of the Animated News & Views team and your fellow forum members for a live chat during the Oscar telecast! Not only will we talk shop, we'll also keep a running live update of who is leading in our Oscar prediction contest throughout the night!

We'll officially kick off the chat at 7:30pm ET on Sunday, February 22nd. Registered forum members can click the "Chat Lounge" link at the top of any forum page to enter the chat room.

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It'll probably be the same as last year, where there isn't a clear sweep, and they throw us a curveball on every single "locked" category except for...(duh!)...Best Animated.

But I'll go through with the futility anyway.

(I mean, we accused them last year of just cribbing Golden Globes nominations, now that the voting period has been cut too short for them to think of their own...Which is about the only explanation I can think of for Robert Downey Jr. actually getting a Sup.Actor nomination for "Tropic Thunder".)

The other is that there's almost a tradition of providing at least one nomination for either Best Supporting Actor or Supporting Actress for a very broad performance, usually in a commercial release.

From several crowd-pleasers in the 1960s to Marissa Tomei in the 1990s and Johnny Depp's Jack Sparrow, the Academy has seen fit to feature such a role - usually the year's water cooler talking point - in the Supporting categories.

This year we have two: Downey Jr, and Heath Ledger. Ledger's win is almost a formality now, but I don't think Downey Jr would have gotten it anyway...it's very rare that these performances do...it's just a way for "audience favorites" to be justly recognised.

With Oscar chats seemingly a dying breed on the web, we had a pretty packed house and a continuous stream of comments during the 81st Academy Awards broadcast last night, with people from all over the world joining us to talk through the ceremony.

Below is a full transcript of the evening, slightly edited for some comments to remain on our PG-rated boards. Please be advised that, as a UK dweller, the time stamp refers to my local time in London...yep, I really was up until past 5am this morning!

Anyway, for those that couldn't join us, here's the highs and lows of what was said: